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This article focuses on the relationship between American literary naturalism and the American city. American literary naturalism, to a significant extent, emerged in the 1890s in response to the phenomenon of the new American city. Like other Americans, the classic naturalists reacted to it in quite different ways; but they were, above all, determined not to ignore it. Stephen Crane and Frank Norris were two of the first American naturalists to treat the city, and their responses to it reflected the complex national view of urban America. For Crane and Norris, of middle- and upper-class...

This article focuses on the relationship between American literary naturalism and the American city. American literary naturalism, to a significant extent, emerged in the 1890s in response to the phenomenon of the new American city. Like other Americans, the classic naturalists reacted to it in quite different ways; but they were, above all, determined not to ignore it. Stephen Crane and Frank Norris were two of the first American naturalists to treat the city, and their responses to it reflected the complex national view of urban America. For Crane and Norris, of middle- and upper-class backgrounds, respectively, the city was both fascinating and disturbing in its foreignness. Both perceived intuitively that this new American space could not be approached from the perspective of the realism associated with William Dean Howells and Henry James, that on a crucial level it was inherently and profoundly irrational.